We’ve been busy adding functionality to our REST API and wanted to let you know about a few updates that are currently in production on the People and Giving realms:

Include=Requirements

It’s now possible to pass an additional include attribute to the people search method. You can use include=requirements to get a list of people with their individual requirements. You must pass a custom content type in the header for this to work. For example:

This will return a paged set of people records with their individual requirements.

Contribution Sub Types

We’ve added a new resource to the giving realm of the API: contribution sub types with list and show methods. It has always been possible to designate a contribution sub type as part of a contribution receipt. However, until this release, it was not possible to query the API to retrieve a list of…

Today we are featuring a user case story submitted by Todd Darling of Hope Community Church in Raleigh, NC. Todd has developed a creative solution which utilizes our API to enhance their student check in experience. Check out the video and post outlining exactly how they are doing this. Many thanks to Todd and the technology team at Hope Community Church for the work they put into sharing this with our developer community. Enjoy!

THE SETUP: For our middle and high school student ministries on the weekend, the students check themselves in, most of the time without a parent. During our midweek middle school service—which often has 300+ middle schoolers—a lot of students bring friends whose families don’t even go to Hope (which is AWESOME!)

We have released two updates to our Groups Realm. The first is a new resource for retrieving Group Search Categories. It is now possible to pull group category IDs via the API and pass the “categoryID” as a search parameter on a group search. This will allow those who have built their own custom user interface for interacting with small groups to match the search categories on their website, with what they have defined within portal! Check out the documentation here: http://developer.fellowshipone.com/docs/groups/v1/categories.help

In addition, we added a node to a group resource called “isLocationPrivate”. If the location of a small group is set to private within Fellowship One, it is now possible to pull that data back via the API. The node is optional and will not break any existing implementations for retrieving and creating groups. Consume away!

We are excited to announce the release of new functionality within our REST API—the ability to create inFellowship user accounts! This highly requested feature will allow developers within our developer community the ability to create a seamless user experience when integrating with our API. Examples of where we expect this to be consumed the most would be within church websites and custom built church applications. Our 3rd party vendors may benefit from this enhancement also.

The firstName, lastName, email fields are self-explanatory. The urlRedirect is the call back address that you would like your website/app user to be sent to after the inFellowship account is created and activated.

We are excited to announce the latest of additions to our API, Single Sign On! The following video is the first part of a two part series showing how to consume these new API methods. Part two will demonstrate using the API to create an Infellowship User Account. We would love to hear your feedback on this. Please test it out in the staging area and let us know your thoughts!

Check out our new gallery of 3rd party vendor applications that integrate with Fellowship One using our API! To enable an application, you can login to Fellowship One and select Admin and Applications. Our new app showcase features screenshots of the apps along with additional details of what the app does and how to contact the vendor.

If you are a vendor looking to integrate with Fellowship One, please use the gallery to view the types of apps we currently offer to determine how you can best integrate and extend the functionality of Fellowship One. The process starts by applying for an API key. You will receive a sandbox environment in which to build and test your code. Once development is complete, you would then need to submit your code to our API Code Review team and…

As many of you know, earlier this year we began to streamline the types of communication values available in Fellowship One. More information about the project can be found on our community blog here, and also on the developer blog here.

As a result of this project, we enhanced functionality around communication values via our API, and last week we pushed the enhancements to production. You, our developer community, responded very well to the changes. You rock!

Here is a review of the changes and enhancements:

Reduction in Communication Types.

GET https:// demo.fellowshiponeapi.com/v1/communications/communicationtypes

We are excited to announce our latest API enhancement - Individual Requirements! Individual Requirements are typically used for two reasons: to track items that need to be completed before a person can volunteer for a job and to track different stages of membership. Requirements can be specific and fully customized.

This API feature enhancement expands the capacity of our API to both churches and vendors alike. Both will now be able to create, read, update and delete Individual Requirements via the API, which opens up the potential for new vendors to partner with Fellowship One in delivering automated background check solutions. Active Network | Faith already partners with a few well-known background check companies and the integration is written directly into Fellowship One. By exposing individual requirements via our publically facing API, the opportunity for any vendor to integrate with Fellowship One is now a reality.

If you are in software development or technical operations of any kind, you are probably familiar with the term “Roll Back”. For those of you who are not in either camp mentioned above, allow me to provide a brief definition:

Rollback: To return the system, software, or database to some previous state (hopefully the state prior to your deployment).

Back in August of 2010, our teams at Fellowship Technologies started on the long road to continuous delivery. Continuous delivery is the notion that you engineer your software to allow for a continuous deployment through all environments, up to and including Production (with little to no manual intervention). It is also the notion that your engineering practices are so solid that each change you make to the system is backed by a series of automated tests written by the development team. This of course provides confidence and…

Any cool ideas on what you can do with this? Let us know what you’re doing with the API realms via twitter or forum.

Nick Floyd is an Architect for Fellowship Technologies (part of Active Network). Currently he is focused on improving, designing, and building the architecture around the Fellowship One platform. He likes learning about new technologies and languages (the obscure and the vanilla) as well as learning about new trends and practices around getting really good software from development to the users, fast. He is passionate about software development and helping other developers.

We’re back again to bring you two new realms for accessing your data via FellowshipOne. The Groups Realm and the Events Realm are the two newest members of our API family! The Groups Realm opens up access to Fellowship One’s Groups 2.0 features and allows churches and vendors to create new Groups 2.0 capabilities or integrate with other solutions. The Events Realm provides access to a primary event that can be associated with a Group within the Groups Realm.

Note: The Events Realm does not at this time provide access to Fellowship One Activities, Check-in, or Event Registration.

One of our consumers was nice enough to let us know about an “undocumented feature.” Normally with bug fixes and small enhancements we’d just deliver the changes and let the docs tell the story, however, this change is around a more sensitive area and wanted to make sure that everyone knew about it.

The change is to Creates and Updates of the people resource on status/comment.

This has been fixed to now do what you might expect it to do in your sand box environment and we are planning on pushing the change to production tomorrow. If you have a chance please go check it out and let…

The dev team has been working hard to bring you the next step in the Fellowship One REST API stack - the Giving Realm! We’ve opened up all sorts of resources to help you bring giving into your church. From accounts to sub funds - all the resources you’ve been asking for served up on a RESTful plate.

Realms

You might also notice that we are using a new term to classify our API resource sets: REALMS. Realms are how we will be classifying groups of functionality exposed through the APIs and will help you manage your consumption through segmentation. The realms will provide churches with the ability to allow or restrict what data consumer applications use and they will enable developers of consumer applications a platform to request specific application keys for specific functions a al carte or application keys that cover the entire stack. For instance, when…

Fellowship Technologies started in 2004 and finished that year with 60 churches; this past year we added 465 churches and are now serving over 1,700 ministries worldwide. When we came to market, Software as a Service was a relatively new concept and we were able to offer our church partners capabilities that were not available in other solutions. And now it’s time to raise the bar again.

Ruby on Rails, often shortened to Rails or RoR, is an open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language that makes it easier to develop, deploy and maintain web apps. Rails uses the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture pattern to organize application programming. It includes tools that make common development tasks easier “out of the box”, such as scaffolding that can automatically construct some of the models and views needed for a basic website. Also included are WEBrick, a simple ruby web server, and Rake, which is a build system.

Together with Rails these tools provide a basic development environment. One of Rails’ biggest strengths is metaprogramming, Rails introduces the Active Record framework, a design pattern by Martin Fowler. The rails version of Active Record discovers the columns in a database schema and automatically attaches them to your domain objects using metaprogramming. Rails also relies on convention over…

Looking back, only for moment…

Almost a year ago to the day, Fellowship Technologies deployed the Fellowship One REST API into production. We were excited to achieve this milestone since it represented months of dedicated work by our development team. Since then committed developers, vendors, and our own staff have come together to form a Community dedicated to bring solutions to the church world. I am encouraged and edified by the fantastic work that has been accomplished. Good work!

If you cook it, then you better be prepared to eat it…

We believe that the best way to prove our API can accomplish what others need it to accomplish is to use it ourselves. No… I am not talking about for just some things like a mobile app that does this, or a CMS shared login, or vendor solution integration. I am talking about using our own API for the…

Sorry for that downtime, but good news…it is back up! Go have fun creating with the API! And we want to make sure we give credit to our awesome TechOps team here at FT for getting the environment back on it’s feet. That’s a group of people that do a ton of awesome work and you rarely hear about!

**Also, since this is now taking the spot on our home page, be sure to check out our newest blog post “Android & OAuth” by our developer, Kelly!

Just a quick note to let you know that we are currently experiencing some unexpected downtime in our Sandbox/Staging environment. Sorry for any issues that may cause you, we’re working to get it back up as soon as possible. For the quickest notification when it is back up (and a lot of other great stuff), please follow us on Twitter @F1Dev!

Thank you for your patience!

**Also, since this is now taking the spot on our home page, be sure to check out our newest blog post “Android & OAuth” by our developer, Kelly!

F# became a first class citizen in Visual Studio 2010. What is F#? F# is a multiparadigm programming language built on .NET, which supports functional programming, object-oriented programming and imperative programming (F# allows you to modify the contents of memory). F# is also statically typed but has type inference built in it. Most of time, the programmers don’t need to explicitly put the type annotation for the variables/identifiers since the compiler will automatically figure it out. For example, let a = 1 is a valid expression. However, the real story will be let (a : int) = 1. Because the compiler can figure out the type of a is int, the programmer doesn’t need put the type when he introduces the value a.

A while ago, I found a problem on the MIT website. Here is the problem: You are given an arithmetic expression containing N real numbers and N -…